Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday October 12, 2010 @08:14AM
from the boo-urns dept.

eldavojohn writes "Remember those 30 new nuclear reactors the US was slated to build? Those plans have been halted. A few years ago, it seemed like a really good idea to build a bunch of nuclear reactors. The environmental impacts of other energy production methods were becoming well known and the economy was tanking. Well, natural gas is now much cheaper, and as a result it looks like building a single nuclear reactor in Maryland is such a risky venture that Constellation can't reach an agreement with the federal government for the loans it needs to build that reactor. The government wants Constellation to sign an agreement with a local energy provider to ensure they'll recoup at least some of the money on the loan, but Constellation doesn't like the terms. So, the first of those thirty reactors has officially stalled, with no resolution in sight. It looks like it'd take an economic meltdown to trigger nuclear reactor production in the US."

I seriously doubt that westinghouse has anything to do with Thorium based reactors not being on the short list despite their many benefits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Key_benefits [wikipedia.org]).I would say it has far more to do with the lack of ability to produce weapons with their byproducts. The US would prefer to get a little something extra out of the deal.

Sadly no commercial power reactor in the US has ever produced nuclear grade material.

The DOD after demanding we go uranium (over the cheaper and more plentiful thorium) to make weapons found it would be difficult to securely and covertly build bombs with commercial reactor output.

Instead they found it far more effective to build dedicated "bomb reactors". We build a dozen or so plutonium piles which dutifully converted uranium into plutonium under the optimum conditions to boost weapons grade yield. Those reactors ran for roughly 3 decades.. Today we have roughly 20,000 dismantled plutonium pits (from obsolete weapons) plus a couple metric tons of bulk plutonium. Once produced and refined the plutonium lasts very very very long time. The US could arm not just itself but the entire world w/ nuclear weapons just from our dismantled pits. There is no need for uranium reactors to produce weapons.

Sadly we are stuck w/ a different kind of legacy. Because of the DOD insistence (for the option they never used) ALL our expertise, knowledge, operateing experience, processes, and ancillary businesses are 100% focused on uranium. Going to thorium would be like starting all over. No company is going to take that kind of multi billion dollar risk without govt support.

If we want to make the switch to thorium it would require a $50 - $100B commitment from US govt to build the research reactors, the testing, the build out to commercial grade plants, then build a dozen or so plants so we get economies of scale plus the training, and the support businesses (fuel processing, etc).

You can't build a single nuclear reactor. The overhead is too large. You need a minimum critical mass of reactors to get economies of scale. There is no way to switch to thorium using free market principles (at least not at current energy prices). The risk vs reward simply isn't there.

I seriously doubt that westinghouse has anything to do with Thorium based reactors not being on the short list despite their many benefits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Key_benefits [wikipedia.org]).
I would say it has far more to do with the lack of ability to produce weapons with their byproducts. The US would prefer to get a little something extra out of the deal.

Looking at the Wikipedia page, most the claimed benefits for thorium are no different from those of an appropriately designed modern uranium reactor ("no possibility of a meltdown, it generates power inexpensively, it does not produce weapons-grade by-products.. will burn up... nuclear weapon stockpiles"), the one signficant different claim ("will burn up existing high-level waste") is not true.

It can correctly be said that the high level waste from a thorium reactor would be about half that of a uranium reactor, but given the small volume of the current waste stream this gives small actual advantage.

Thorium reactors are a perfectly viable technology, but it is relatively undeveloped, and thus has much longer lead times, and much greater up front costs for no significant advantage.

The Achilles heel of nuclear power has always been the high capital costs, which means a longer period before profitable returns, and thus greater risk. It is simple hard-headed investment decision making that has kept nuclear power plants form being built. With thorium this problem is magnified.

If we can't get an established technology like uranium reactor built, thorium has no chance at all.

Not going to happen in the US. Licensing costs are too expensive to justify anything but the 1600 MWe behemoths using standard fuel cycles with proven technology.

I don't know how many lobbyists Westinghouse has, but I do have an idea of how many engineers they have working to satisfy the NRC's licensing requirements for their own designs. Likewise with Mitsubishi and General Electric.

Typical corporate situation where a zillion corps own parts of a zillion other corps. However they seem to have blown about a couple million per year. So I'd guess a high single digit number of lobbyist equivalents, but probably dozens each working part time? Congressmen would see maybe fifty faces, but only get a handful of person-years of work out of the group (insert joke about sounding like where I work...)

The efficiency of this one is less than the efficiency of producing biofuel which is staggeringly low in the first place. Separating CO2 from the air requires a staggering amount of energy as you have to liquefy air first. We are looking at under 5% efficiency for the entire process end-to-end here if not even less - around 1%.

No thanks.

I'd rather invest into finding ways to transport, store and use electricity and/or "simple" hydrogen more efficiently.

You are getting argued into a corner a million miles away from what was suggested above. Getting carbon dioxide to react with something and bind to it is one thing, making aviation fuel (as an example of a hydrocarbon) from air is another and getting into an extreme realm of energy consumption and general weirdness that really shows the above poster doesn't know what they are talking about.

Reactors are always going to be expensive. At some point the cost will make the power generated by the plant to be not profitable enough to sustain the operation - and maintenance - of the plant. This isn't all that surprising al all. If other sources of power can be built less, and produce power for less, then reactors are going to sit and wait their turn again. Unfortunately for the nuclear industry the approval process takes longer than the economic swings that make their product desirable.

Sovereign governments get to emit credit. If they cannot, in these days, what you have is a financier dictatorship. The usual phrase is a bankers dictatorship.

You are right on the approval process. You want to build a nuke,then you take out a loan. If it takes ten years to start getting revenue, then you are screwed. However, approval,and forced design changes, are a politiical thing, not a property of nukes. Indeed, other countries have been able to build quickly. And now we ar getting barge-based fa

Oil spills are visible to the naked eye and are of course not good either but the time that they are really causing any dangers is short compared to nuclear spills.

Seriously? An ex-roommate of mine became a geologist and researched the effects of arsenic leaching out of coal mine tailings. So... lets both agree a reactor fuel rod is harmless after X million years. Are you seriously trying to tell me that the arsenic in the mine tailings magically disappears in a similar interval of time?

Oil spills are a VERY special case because what came from living things can easily be eaten and broken down by living things. Arsenic and other heavy metals from coal mining don't disappear the same way.

The subject is nuclear, coal is going to come up sooner or later because it's in the tired old 1970s script the advocates read to push their tired old 1970s technology or even failed dreams of the 1950s. I just wish they would pay attention to their own subject and learn about recent advances in nuclear power so that they would at least have something interesting to say.

The subject is coal, because coal is the only usable, reasonably constant and reliable expandable baseload source of power other than nuclear. Natgas is too expensive to consider, hydro is unexpandable (tapped out).

Just a distractor to the real argument... Nuke waste is "bad for a long time". So freaking what. Every other industrial era waste is also bad, and its bad FOREVER not just a couple half lives. I'd feel much better about dumping nukewaste that we know will be harmless in a couple years, than dumping, say, heavy metals that we know will never, ever be harmless.

Basically nuke is coal except the waste is easily contained, concentrated, and becomes harmless in a long time.

Or, Coal is nuke except the waste is inherently uncontainable, spread all over the place (you're breathing it now) and its harmful forever.

Either way we need to develop a technology for injecting waste into subduction zones. This is the Earth's ultimate recycling system. The mantle is full of radioactives anyway, so it's a perfect place to dispose of radioactive waste. In a jillion years when it comes out of a volcano someplace it will have been processed.

Or, Coal is nuke except the waste is inherently uncontainable, spread all over the place (you're breathing it now) and its harmful forever.

Indeed, more fissionable nuclear material is released into the atmosphere from the burning of coal than is actually used up in nuclear reactors... and the fissionable materials are a minuscul

Still - you have a lot of waste when producing the fuel, don't forget that. The large amount of waste that nobody speaks of is created during the mining and enrichment processes. It may be low active but toxic anyway.

Nuclear power doesn't HAVE to produce anywhere near as much toxic crap as it currently does. If you overcome the cold war era BS about "nuclear proliferation" and allow spent-fuel reprocessing and use the right reactor designs (including breeder reactors) the total amount of waste left after you have extracted all the usefully-extractable energy from the nuclear fuel is significantly smaller and remains radioactive for less time.

If you use fuels like Thorium that dont require pre-enrichment, you can get eve

"Chernobyl happened because they turned all the safety systems off and ran the reactor in ways it wasnt designed to. And then acted all surprised when it blew up. Also, the reactor design was flawed from day one (because it had a positive void coefficient)"Not just that, but in addition the reactor had no containment building and the core was full of flammable graphite.

There are at least 3-4 reactor design differences and 3-4 procedural differences between even "dinosaur" domestic PWR/BWR designs and the Ch

Chernobyl is the worst possible example to illustrate the risk of Western style nuclear reactors.

Chernobyl is positive void coefficient reactor. Simply put as it gets hotter, the water turns to steam and that INCREASES the rate of fission (which leads to more heat -> more steam -> more fission).

Everyone knew Chernobyl was unsafe even the Soviets. They didn't build a containment dome because it costs money. The same country was intentionally starving its own people by the millions (the "famine" in U

Wasn't sustainable energy supposed to be the really expensive one? Wasn't nuclear supposed to save us while the real sustainable energy is being developed?

It's funny how the costs of nuclear energy are structurally underestimated, while sustainable energy (wind/solar) continuously has to fight the image of being expensive.It says enough that all 28 business plans for nuclear reactors are halted, partially because a regulatory system for greenhouse gases (the "cap and trade" system) was not put into effect.

It's much harder (note I said harder, not impossible) to create base load generation for a grid from solar/wind than from nuclear. It requires some sort of energy storage (either a battery, or pumped reservoir, etc) to do so from wind and solar, and if a long enough period of time with the wrong kind of weather happens that base vanishes. If we had *tons* of solar and wind, all over the country balancing load, and very efficient transmission from coast to coast I suppose it would solve that problem, but it'

A major cost of nuclear reactors is the bickering of the NIMBYs. Construction can take fifteen years (ten for bickering, five for construction). An investor could be investing in something else which makes money during that time so to convince him to invest in your plant you have to garantee massive returns in the future.

So then, tell me why construction took decades in Iran? The French shoot protesting NIMBYs, so why does it take so long there as well? How about in China - even the little pebble bed prototypes took a long time.IMHO your theory has no worth apart from providing a cardboard cutout figure to blame. If those hippies were really so powerful as you pretend the troops would never have been sent to Iraq because there has never been an anti-nuclear protest anywhere near as big as the anti-war ones.Government reg

You talk in such absolutes. The real reality is the entire market for resources is quite volatile. For instance I'm happy to hear you Americans have cheap natural gas. Our company built an on-site gas co-generation plant here 10 years ago to take advantages of low gas prices too. At the time the cost of gas energy compared to coal energy was at parity. For several years we we ran our gas generators at max capacity and exported power back to the grid. Fast forward to now, coal is still cheap, but gas prices

Part of the reason nuclear plants are so expensive is that any time the word "nuclear" is mentioned, a bunch of people go "ZOMG NUCLEAR!!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE LIKE THREE CHERNOBYL ISLAND!!1!!ONE!" And then they demand study after study after study after study after study, supposedly to make sure the native grasshopper population isn't inconvenienced or trying to prove that the reactor won't be damaged if a rock the size of Bobby Dodd stadium falls on it, but really just intended to ramp the legal costs up

First of all the article is about competition with natural gas, the cheapest form of electricity generation currently available. The reason nuclear has issues compeeting is the same that renewables don't cut it, the fossil fuels are getting a free pass emitting pollutants and greenhosue gases which would be very expensive to sequester and dealt with properly.

Secondly when it comes to replacing fossil fuels it's not a question of nuclear OR renewables, we will need both. Even MITs somewhat optimistic forecas

Even MITs somewhat optimistic forecast of nuclear growth will not displace the fossil fuels within several decades, and the situation is similar for energy conservation and the renewables. It is however quite possible to get rid of teh fossil fuels if you are willing to use ALL of these techniques in combination.

Yes, because it's always been much more efficient to build dozens of different products which all do essentially the same job, instead of coming up with one good design and then popping it out like an assembly-line.

because every leaf you turn over will provide a new group to challenge the building of a nuclear plant. Wind is not a competitor to Nuclear, it cannot fulfill the same role. Nuclear is base load, Wind can do peak. Wind is starting to feel the regulation and lawsuit issues Nuclear has, not to the same extent. It will, there are enough loons to oppose anything.

Look up how many "studies" are needed to put up a new reactor, even on a site with them, then compare it to the willingness to look to look the other way when putting up any power generation associated with "green". Then go read the stories where people can't stand the noise of wind farms and ask yourself, how long before that study increases costs to the point people think twice, three times, or more. Then to top it off, you can have your windfarms, provided only the poor are afflicted with them, and pretty soon no coast will be safe because of sight pollution concerns.

Some rich bored guy should build a full up super-modern reactor (thorium, pebble bed, fast breeder, I have no clue), and put it near a city, where ever they feel like. Don't do any studies, don't ask anyone if its ok. Just put it there. The catch being that they don't put any fuel in it, and never have any intent of doing so. Its not really a nuclear reactor, so I don't see how it can violate any regulations. And it will just sit there with a website detailing its budget, schedule, and design as a less

You actually make one of the mistakes that always occurs in this discussion by using the term "sustainable energy". The discussion should be about wind power, solar power, nuclear power, natural gas, oil, coal, etc.. All of these sources of energy have different benefits and costs. Wind power and solar power are not equally good or bad ideas. Whether either one is a good or bad idea depends on where one is talking about putting them.
The perception of the two that I have seen is this:
wind/solar power: saf

Nuclear would do fine too if it go an utterly unsustainable "renewable energy" credit of 1.25 cent per kWh wholesale.

That is roughly 25% of wholesale power price. Many wind farms sell power in middle of a night at a loss (litterally pay people to take power) because if they don't they lose the 1.25 cent per kWh credit.

Let me know when wind/solar can produce 100 GW of power without a 25% subsidy.

Reality:- sustainable energy: growing market only with an unsustainable 25% wholesale power subsidy.

The US has never had a containment structure breech. In fact it has never had any reactor pressure vessel burst thus that is 2 barriers which would both have to be defeated to have a release like Chernobyl.

There are numerous factors that make an accident on the scope and scale of Chernobyl impossible in the US. This isn't to say some future US reactor couldn't have a core event but it would be more limited in scope.

Reality:
The market has already worked all this out. If sustainable energy were economically viable there'd be no room for nuclear power. The problems here are all regulatory. Nuclear energy would also be far less expensive if hippies got out of the way of things like Yukka Mountain.

Its possible that all calculations use normal light water reactor designs. I bet the economics would be much better if you used advanced designs like thorium reactors or travelling wave reactors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_wave_reactor [wikipedia.org]

I doubt it. Any project can be made arbitrarily expensive by political maneuvering, and selling a township or even a state on "Hey, we've got a brand new type of nuclear fission reactor we'd like to try out in your area" suffers from serious NIMBY effects, and thus politicians will try to be seen opposing it.

Back when nuclear reactors were falling out of fashion I ran into a study that showed a huge percentage of the cost of a nuclear plant in the US was the legal fees for all the government submissions and approvals. The number that sticks in my head was 90% but I hope this was wrong. I suspect what ever it was it is probably worse now due to the lingering induced paranoia about anything 'nuclear'. And the approval process for any project going through the entrails of government is probably vast.
Remembering

Well, natural gas is now much cheaper, and as a result it looks like building a single nuclear reactor in Maryland is such a risky venture

Natural gas is only cheaper because we are using less of it. As soon as the economy rebounds the price will increase. This is the short sighted view that has gotten us into this mess over the last 30 years.

Only about 10% of the bailout money actually went to building things America needs rather than maintaining the illusion of prosperity in a number of states.

Imagine if the federal government had spent all $700B on infrastructure development. That would probably have put a few hundred thousand people back to work temporarily and gotten us at least the majority of those 30 nuclear reactors funded fully.

The federal government could easily then assign ownership of the loans to a corporation modeled on the Resolution Trust Corporation [wikipedia.org] which was the federal corporation that liquidated the assets of the S&Ls.

The point is that if we were going to create a huge bill for our grandchildren to pay off, we should at least have spent them money on something of value.

And that's really the problem with central planning.

It's not that it's impossible for government to do the right thing - it's that when you give that much money and power to a bunch of politicians they make decisions based on politics rather than objective technical criteria.

Everyone thinks they could do a job of it if only they had absolute power but in reality the process you need to go through to get that kind of power forces you to become a politician.

Only about 10% of the bailout money actually went to building things America needs rather than maintaining the illusion of prosperity in a number of states.

And your source for this stat is to be found --- where?

Imagine if the federal government had spent all $700B on infrastructure development

It takes time.

Since about 1900, the Black Canyon and nearby Boulder Canyon had been investigated for their potential to support a dam that would control floods, provide irrigation water and produce hydroelectric powe

I wasn't aware that the Calvert Cliffs plant was ever scheduled to be the first new design plant to be built in the US. At one time that label was applied to the South Texas Project, and I believe that the two new reactors at Vogtle are now in the lead. The Vogtle reactors use the Westinghouse AP1000 design, and the latest revision to that design is nearing presentation to the NRC for certification. (An earlier revision has already been certified.) The Calvert Cliffs reactor was an Areva EPR, which is s

In the aftermath of gas drilling micro-disasters (the nature of gas drilling results in localized environmental damage, but when it happens it is a disaster for those nearby), I'm guessing increasing regulation is going to increase the costs of gas drilling.

There's a moratorium on shale gas drilling (specifically on well stimulation by hydrofracturing, but no one is going to drill a well they can't frack) in New York State after the rampant water contamination incidents all over Pennsylvania. For example, the groundwater in Dimock, PA became undrinkable within a year or so of the commencement of drilling. People can actually light their tap water on fire now.

Gas is not a long-term option, and in fact, it looks like the way it is being drilled now is going to have severe long-term environmental consequences (it already has in many drilling areas). Nuclear is a long-term investment.

The Journal of the American Water Works Association had a significant article this month dealing with the effects of fracking on watersheds. Those of you who think natural gas is clean have no concept of what drillers use to get the natural gas from shale in places such as New York state.

In fact, the regulations themselves are not aligned to balance these considerations in any way. Drilling rights are completely disconnected from watershed concerns.

Eventually (one year? five years?) the world economy will pick back up, and energy supplies will tighten back up again. When that happens, having spare base load electric generation capacity will be very valuable.

I live near Washington DC, and I'm pissed that the local utilities can't see this coming. I've grown used to having the lights come on when I flip a switch, dammit.

The whole point of LEADERSHIP is not to invest in alternative energy when other energy sources are prohibitively expensive (how quickly we forget $150/bbl oil), but to shape the future so that when energy costs increase again the infrastructure is already in place.

I am disappointed that the US government believes that spending trillions of dollars to create inefficient, artificial jobs is more worthwhile than investing in the future of the country in terms of solid infrastructure. Those nuclear plants will not be cheaper to design and build in 20 years.

In the 1930's FDR went about building the interstate system, completing the Hoover Dam (which provided energy to California, Arizona and Nevada), the Tennessee Valley Authority which provided power to the South-East. This cheap power, as well as the roadways which permitted goods to be moved across the country cheaply, heralded new economic growth.

Today's government instead would have scrapped these types of projects in favor of repainting federal buildings in Washington, hiring analysts to make sure that homes didn't get foreclosed, while at the same time forking over more money to the banks.

While nuclear power may be expensive, peak oil is coming and there's no way to stop it. China continues to grow, and India will soon start demanding its share as well. There are not enough straws in the oil milk-shake, and putting more straws in only means that the shake will be finished a lot faster. When oil prices begin to rise again it will only be a matter of a few short months before we hit $150/bbl. In the meantime other "alternative energy" types (wind/solar) continue to be far, far less efficient than nuclear power.

Everyone else manages to take a loan and roll it over. Sure there's a risk interest rates go up, but if you think that's the case then those bank rates aren't "crippling" they are just factoring that in.

If you need a government guarantee on your loan in order to afford it then whatever you are doing isn't viable. Whether it's building a nuclear reactor, buying a house, or going to college.

The article says that the ones that do in fact just sell to a monopoly public utility are going ahead, since they have guaranteed revenue and hence didn't even bother getting a guarantee on their loan. Which would appear to be the opposite of your statement.

And yes there's political risk, that's not a reason for a governmetn guarantee though, that's a reason to jack the rates up and not build the thing.

When a utiltiy builds a nuclear power plant, they are not only funding the cost of the plant itself, they are also funding 100% of your fuel cost up front plus containment and future disposal costs. See http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html [world-nuclear.org] for the basis for some realistic cost estimates.

While it is cheaper for the consumer in the long run to run nuclear, there is a huge up front cost associated. Most banks will not accept the risks without an expensive reward. Governments can finance these typ

Pardon me in advance for daring to question the the prevailing hipster wisdom that wind and solar are going to save the world. But why should my tax dollars be going to put solar panels on YOUR roof (or wind turbines in your yard, for that matter), when you're almost certainly going to use 100% of the power generated and reap all the economic benefits for yourself? Are you going to pay back the difference it makes in your electric bill to the government until that loan is repaid? Nope.

How about a government-sponsored plan or tax-incentive to put solar panels or shingles on all businesses and homes like they are doing for efficient windows and appliances?

Small local generators make little sense, since we can simply supply the power generated in specialist facilities over the power grid. Replacing or upgrading local generators and keeping them running efficiently would be a very costly operation. By contrast, upgrading or even replacing a few large facilities and supplying power to the s

Local generation reduces the load on the grid. The Germans are putting in a lot of micro CHP plants, using VW engines, for generation and heating. You can run an IC engine on methane very well - the lack of oil contamination and reduced carbon buildup in the heads means that you can expect high reliability and long service intervals. Add in solar PV (so the generator simply backs off when the sun shines), remote control so the generators are run when needed, and the grid becomes easier to manage. Approvals

Most providers in the US will do that now, the problem is that panels are still expensive enough it takes something like 20 years to make your money back, even if you live somewhere sunny and have a good sized roof

They have had that in Victoria, Australia for about a year now [vic.gov.au]. I haven't checked the other states.

In Victoria, the scheme is useless. While the power companies must offer a standard feed-in tariff for excess power, they are entitled to have different packages or terms and conditions than their usual accounts. In practice, that means that they charge more for the power consumed to offset what they pay back to the household. You don't go solar to save money in this country.

So nuclear is in doubt because someone is asking for loans and subsidy the size of a small countries GDP, and with the banks ask for a guarantee, they baulk. This is really a story of a company demanding money and desire to run a sure thing into the ground. With these types of dollars, its hardly the least bit unreasonable to demand some protection of the loan. This seems to hint that they intended to do something insanely poor with the management of the project or the reactor.

#1 - Nuclear reactor production is put under more government scrutiny than any other energy production method. Not that it isn't justifiable in large degree, just that it increases the costs of running the reactor.

#2 - The US has no fuel recycling program. If we DID have a responsible fuel recycling program, we wouldn't have to worry about the whiny idiots going "but it produces nuclear waste", nor would we be having to dig up ore for fuel - reprocessed, recycled fuel can be extracted from "spent waste" over and over again, which would take care of 95% or greater of our current "nuclear waste" in storage.

#3 - Energy still isn't deregulated on the east coast. The government controls the pricing, therefore it makes sense that the people sticking their money out to build the reactor would want to have some guarantee in writing that the government isn't going to try to force them to operate at a loss.

The larger problem is that the idiot fringe currently in control of the Democrat Party - as evidenced by the current administration's reaction to basically everything energy-related - are a bunch of total morons who are so kooky that even the co-founder of Greenpeace [wired.com] recognized them for the wack-jobs that they are.

Of course, there are a number of other things that "could" be done on the energy conservation front. The US could outlaw residential air-conditioning/heating systems that don't incorporate a closed-loop ground heat pump, and require any legacy systems to be switched over at time of replacement. They could pass a national law protecting the right of all homeowners to implement "greywater" systems, rain cisterns, and solar collectors. They could focus in on outdated, inefficient "freeway flyer" bus routes and replace them all with electric train systems.

But then again, we live in a time when municipalities claim they are working for "safety" and put up red-light cameras and then shorten the yellow timing to get more tickets, despite every study out there showing that if you want to reduce accidents, lengthening the yellow time does much, much more than putting up a fucking camera. So I doubt the people would have any trust in their government that any of the other things I suggested earlier were done with the right motives...

But then again, we live in a time when municipalities claim they are working for "safety" and put up red-light cameras and then shorten the yellow timing to get more tickets

Sometimes I wonder how the people making these decisions can sleep at night. How can someone justify reducing the yellow light time, thereby increasing the likelyhood of an accident, all in the name of more revenue? It boggles the mind.

It will take an economic MELTDOWN to trigger nuclear reactor production

With peak oil and no nuclear power to compensate, we might just see one. Algae as a biofuel might work, and solar might work if they improve the tech enough. Most of the other oft-touted other alternatives are a load of crap.